The disclosure relates to electrical battery plate manufacturing. More specifically, the disclosure relates to manufacturing equipment and methodologies for the drying of lead oxide paste or the like to grids that then form battery plates inside an electrical battery.
Conventional battery plate manufacturing involves the application of lead oxide paste to a lead grid or matrix strip (e.g., a continuous cast strip or an expanded metal strip) prior to division of the pasted strip into individual grids or matrices that define the resulting battery plates and support the disposed lead oxide paste. Following the paste application, the applied paste of the pasted strip must be dried, i.e., “flash drying,” to some extent sufficient to allow dividing and/or transport to a divider that divides or separates portions of the pasted strip into individual grids or further divides pasted panels into smaller grids of a desirable dimension for subsequent stacking, further drying and curing. Pasted plate strips require this initial flash drying operation to remove excess moisture and are followed by an extensive curing process. The curing process, which may comprise oven drying at high humidity, steam treatment or both, is required to reduce the free lead content and to provide strength and handleability to the plates for further processing.
Conventional flash drying equipment and techniques utilize a drying oven with Infra-Red (IR) heaters, direct-fired burners, or electric duct heaters as well as mechanisms for circulating air within the oven to heat the pasted strip to remove moisture therefrom. Accordingly, such flash drying equipment includes conveyer belts or chains in a configuration that moves the pasted strip through the length of the flash drying oven. Thus, as the pasted strip is heated by increasing the ambient temperature within the flash drying oven, the moisture is removed to some extent as steam and fumes, which are evacuated from the flash drying oven using conventional ventilation techniques.
Because of the conveyor belt configuration that is used to move the pasted strip and because of the amount of heat and length of time that the pasted strip must be exposed to circulated to enable subsequent handling and division, conventional flash drying ovens are large pieces of equipment and often have a length including the inlet and outlet conveyors measuring approximately 24 linear feet (7.3 linear meters), which is significant. Although the size of such conventional flash dryers may be reduced, such a reduction must be accompanied by a reduction in the processing speed of manufacture pasted strip because of the amount of ambient heat that must be applied to the pasted strip.
Accordingly, an illustrated embodiment provided in this disclosure provides an apparatus and method for use in a battery plate fabrication system for contact flash drying lead oxide paste to a battery plate grid strip using a plurality of heated, driven rollers that contact, move and heat a pasted strip through line contact with each roller, wherein each roller is temperature controlled with feedback via a temperature sensor.
Additional features will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon consideration of the following detailed description of drawings exemplifying the best mode as presently perceived.